Sarah Rowe (Lakota/Ponca Tribe of Nebraska), For My Fleabitten Diamond, 2022, oil, acrylic, and ink on canvas, 48 x 72 inches, commissioned for the Elizabeth Rubendall Artist-in-Residence Collection, 2022.0004.0001. © Sarah Rowe. Used by permission.
With a Little Help from Our Friends: New Perspectives on the Collection
Lower-level Gallery
March 6–August 8, 2026
Organized in honor of the Center for Great Plains Studies’ 50th anniversary in 2026, this exhibition highlights the important interdisciplinary focus of the Center and its core intellectual community, the Great Plains Fellows. The Fellows as a group are scholars and community members who are concerned with the past, present, and future of the Great Plains, and they support the Center and its mission in myriad ways.
For this exhibition, 20 Fellows representing diverse disciplines and all four University of Nebraska campuses were invited to select an artwork from the Great Plains Art Museum’s permanent collection and respond to it in any way they chose, whether that’s examining the work through their scholarly lens or through their own lived experiences. This project provides a new avenue for Fellows to engage with the Center and Museum while also sharing fresh and varied perspectives on works in its collection.
Participating Fellows:
Charles J. Bicak, Emeritus Senior VC Academic and Student Affairs, UNK
Christina E. Dando, Peter Kiewit Professor of Geography, UNO
Cristián Doña-Reveco, Associate Professor, Sociology & Anthropology, Director, Office of Latino/Latin American Studies, UNO
Sherilyn Fritz, George Holmes University Professor, Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, School of Biological Sciences, UNL
Thomas Gannon, Associate Professor, English & Ethnic Studies, UNL
Angel M. Hinzo, Assistant Professor, History and Ethnic Studies, UNL
Andrew Husa, Lecturer, School of Global Integrative Studies, UNL
Regina Idoate, Associate Professor & Director of Spirituality, Culture and Health, Department of Health Promotion, UNMC
Darby Kurtz, Assistant Professor; Special Collections Curator, McGoogan Health Sciences Library, UNMC
Salvador Lindquist, Assistant Professor, Landscape Architecture, UNL
Peter Longo, Professor, Political Science, UNK
Louise Lynch-O’Brien, Associate Professor of Insect Biology, Entomology, UNL
Gwendŵr Meredith, Assistant Professor, Natural Resources, UNL
Larkin Powell, Professor, Natural Resources, UNL
Athena Ramos, Associate Professor, College of Public Health and Central States Center for Agricultural Safety and Health, UNMC
Todd Richardson, James R. Schumacher Chair of Ethics; Professor, Goodrich Scholarship Program, UNO
Beth Ritter, Associate Professor, Anthropology & Native American Studies, UNO
Liahnna Stanley, Assistant Professor of Indigeneity, Native Studies, and Communication, University of Utah (formerly Assistant Professor, Communication Studies and Ethnic Studies, UNL)
William Stoutamire, Assistant Professor, History, UNK
Laurinda Weisse, Associate Professor; University Archivist and Digital Repository Manager, Calvin T. Ryan Library, UNK
Elizabeth Burden, Dreaming Into Existence II, 2024, mixed media on paper and canvas.
Elsewhere / The Prairie Was Ours
Lower-level Gallery
August 25–December 19, 2026
The prairie is not just a place—it is a presence. A rhizome not just beneath our feet but also within our psyches. Just as native prairie grasses grow from entangled networks underground, the stories here emerge from roots that are collective, dispersed, and resilient.
Elsewhere / The Prairie Was Ours invites us to understand Nyi Brathge (Nebraska) not only through geography but through relation. It asks: What lives beneath the visible? What networks of kinship, memory, and survival shape this land—and those shaped by it?
This exhibition brings together the work of three artists—Elizabeth Burden, Willa Ahlschwede, and Marci Sue Black—descendants of formerly enslaved Black American, immigrant European American, and Indigenous communities shaped by prairie life. Their works use image, sound, artifact, and gesture to trace and unsettle memory. They invite us to remember not through monuments of stone, but through echoes in the soil and whispers in the archive.
Marci Sue Black is a member of the Jiwere-Nutachi (Otoe-Missouria) tribe of Oklahoma and an Ioway descendant. Being born and raised in her tribal community has shaped and influenced everything she does including her multidisciplinary art and traditional Indigenous mediums such as sewing regalia, beading, and making jewelry, leather handbags, and belts.
Willa Ahlschwede is an educator and curator living in Tucson, Arizona, unceded homelands of the Tohono O’odham. Growing up in Omaha, she is a fifth-generation Nebraskan, where her family received land in Saline County in 1872 as part of the Homestead Act. As an educator in museums and experiential environmental education, she is interested in how we build meaning and possibility through shared experiences with art and the world around us.
Elizabeth Burden is an artist who engages in artistic archivy, blending multidisciplinary studio work with social practice to reflect on the past/present/future. She was born and raised in Lincoln; as the great-granddaughter of the first Black homesteaders (Henry and Mary Burden), she is a third-generation Nebraskan, now living in the Southwest. Burden is the Great Plains Art Museum’s 2026 Elizabeth Rubendall Artist in Residence. Visit the artist during her residency at the museum from Sept. 1 to 12. Learn more about the residency and scheduled events.